Photo credit: Courtesy of CBS Films
“I was married to a miner,” Siân James told Hollywood on the Potomac. “My husband was on strike. I was from a mining family and basically it was the biggest thing that had happened in my community for many many years. As the strike progressed, the women became more and more politicized.”
“I was a young married mother with two children aged eight and five…….. quite happy being a housewife,” she joked, “and as I say – this big thing happened in our community and we had to raise several thousand pounds a week. We had to feed a thousand miners and their families a week; so I got involved with traditional things like selling raffle tickets, selling garden plants, jumble sales, and then became more and more active within the support group. I‘m telling you. I was happy, because both my children had the best clothes, were the neatest kids going to school, and my lace curtains were white. I was happy.”
Jessica Gunning and Siân James at a recent PRIDE event. Photo courtesy of IMDb
“It’s the summer of 1984, Margaret Thatcher is in power and the National Union of Mineworkers is on strike, prompting a London-based group of gay and lesbian activists to raise money to support the strikers’ families. Initially rebuffed by the Union, the group identifies a tiny mining village in Wales and sets off to make their donation in person. As the strike drags on, the two groups discover that standing together makes for the strongest union of all.” Production Notes
James went on to become a Welsh Labour Party politician who has been a Member of Parliament since 2005. Jessica Gunning plays her in PRIDE, due out in theaters this week.
“I think Jessica Gunning’s brilliant. She approached the role brilliantly and she’s become a very very good friend. She actually understands the role, she’s been very very keen to get it right and we were bowled over as a family how much care and attention she’d put into it. I wish her very very great things for this film and after.”
“My mother was a trade unionist,” James explained, “as was my father. Therefore, it was in the DNA but there hadn’t been an opportunity to act upon it. When the strike came – and it was the case that the women had to come to the forefront because if the men were arrested it meant that they could be sacked – the women had to take on a greater role on the picket line. I got involved in public speaking by this point, so I was going around telling people what it was like, how money was being spent. If you were supporting us then you could be reassured that you were helping families and helping the miners. So, yeah, it was a process of more and more exposure, really, to action.” The three real life protagonists weigh in.
We asked James if she thought that labor unions have lost their impact. “Well, I think what we’ve seen is that the trade unions don’t have as many members. I mean, that’s something we can’t argue with, that the trade union membership has gone down. But all of my local trade unions are telling me that their membership is going back up now because in times of adversity people realize that the only defense mechanism they have against oppressive governments are the trade unions,” she explained. “I urge everybody to join trade unions. And I always demand in my role as a politician that if I meet with local employers, I want to meet, if not the trade union representative, I want to meet the worker’s representative.”
“As a politician I’m part of that establishment now, aren’t I? So I always try to be an MP who is a people person, who represents the people who elected me. And that sometimes means that I had to disagree with my government when we were in power. And now it’s my role to speak up on behalf of those people who are not doing so well under the conservative government. And that’s an awful lot of the people that I represent. It’s an honor and a privilege to go to Westminster, but it’s a system that knows very well how to defend itself. And I think one has to find one’s way through that and remain true to those core trade union beliefs that I was raised on and that the strike gave me an opportunity to express.”
Jonathan Blake became a member of LGSM really because his partner Nigel was very active within LGSM and the trade union and had always been an activist. “I think that essentially for me the important thing was very much being a member of LGSM,” he told us. “It was something that was really important within my life. There are lots of things that have happened since, but that was it and it was something that kept me going. So although he was the person that drew me into LGSM, once I was there, it was something that was so important that this was a community that was under threat and we needed to support them. And so there weren’t any sort of questions in terms of, ‘Should we or shouldn’t we?’ We just went for it and that was it.”
“For me personally, I was diagnosed (with aids) in 1982, in October 1982,” he shared with us. “I was given the death sentence. So that, for me, that all became part and parcel of my DNA and it was very difficult. But that aside, there were other things that were as important or more important and it also gave me something to get my teeth into, and so I wasn’t thinking about, ‘Next week I’m going to be dead.’ because I knew that I was going to be dead. I shouldn’t even be here, I’m 65! It’s phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal! Now I’m a pensioner! I’ve already received it, it’s brilliant! I love it! I mean, I thought I wouldn’t make 30, I wouldn’t make 40, I wasn’t going to make 50. So every year is always just a bonus. It’s a real bonus.”
As for Dominic West who plays Blake in the movie: “Yeah, I’m hugely flattered. Dominic is such an amazing actor and so charming to boot. And yes, it’s based on a lot of situations in my life, but it is, I have to say, it is a real honor, a real honor.”
Shame Dance:
“One of the worst things about that period, the 70’s and 80’s, for the lesbian and gay community was that we didn’t think we’d get a voice,” said Mike Jackson. “It’s one thing to oppress people by attacking them, it’s worse to just actually silence them and not allow them to express themselves at all. And that’s often what we came up against. So an opportunity to actually meet the mining community, we knew that really we wouldn’t encounter much opposition once you were there in proximity with them. And that indeed was exactly what happened.”
“The writer’s got a very good phrase,” he noted, “that he’s been using to describe what happened, and he’d just say, ‘The prejudice cannot withstand proximity.’ I think, because we were activists and we were quite – I suppose in today’s terms we would be seen as being quite brave – used to dealing with homophobia that we realized that what we needed was simply an opportunity to meet people – to get them to realize that you neither have two heads, nor do you eat babies for breakfast; that actually, you’re just an ordinary regular guy, you happen to sleep with somebody of the same sex.”
“Many a time I would meet a miner,” Jackson explained, “and not just miners but in my whole life many a time I’ve met people who’ve said to me, ‘Do you know I’ve never met a gay person before in my life?’ And it’s just nonsense, what I’ve been told. I’ve actually had people apologize to me for their own homophobia; not that they’ve attacked me with the homophobia, but because they were badly educated that they absorbed these kind of prejudices. And very quickly that melts when you meet people. The people I’ve ever met in my life who do bear a really deep toxic homophobia are very few and far between. And every single time I’ve met somebody like that I’ve just thought, ‘Oh, darling, what is your pain?'”
PRIDE event.
“We went in to support the mining communities. It was a one-way street as far as we were concerned. We thought that their struggle was so important because it was a fight about democracy, really. It was a fight to maintain trade unionism. The miners weren’t on strike for pay, nor were they on strike for improving their conditions. They were on strike to actually save their own jobs, to save their own mining communities and we believed that this was an attack on trade unionism by the government. I think everything that’s happened in the last 30 years has borne that out now,” Jackson said proudly. “In Britain, I don’t know about here in the States, we have this thing called ‘0 hours contracts’ where people can get employment contracts, but it doesn’t actually offer them any hours. So it’s a meaningless contract. And because the trade unions have been weakened by legislation over the years, it’s really difficult for the unions to fight legislation like that.”
“So our support for them was one-way, but when it came down to it, at the end of the strike we were there in that community on the very day that the decision was made by the national union to return to work,” he explained. “And it was a very sad occasion. And the South Wales mining communities, having been absolutely behind the strike, didn’t want to end the strike, but it was a national decision and they had to. But at that meeting one of the miners present said, ‘Well, we’ve lost our battle now. But we must now turn to those who supported us and help them in their battle and none more so than the lesbians and gays who are here with us now.’ And that was fantastic!”
“And they did that in two really important ways,” Jackson added: “At the 1985 gay pride march, they attended the gay pride march with a trade union banner, with the miners’ banner and with their families, and their presence was such that we were the biggest contingent on the march. We led the 1985 pride march. So you can actually say that the mining communities led the gay pride in 1985. But more important than it was nice was that in October of that year in Britain we have the usual round of Trade Union and Labour Party conferences. Lesbians and gays for years have been trying to get lesbian and gay rights onto the agenda of the trade union movements and onto the agenda of the Labour Party without success. But in 1985 the miners announced their plans that they were going to support that agenda and since they had a block vote, that meant that they had a very powerful bargaining position. Basically, once they announced that they were going to support that proposition, then all the other major English trade unions joined in.
And so 1985 directly as a result of the intervention of the National Union of Mine Workers, lesbian and gay rights for the first time in Britain got onto the national agenda. And of course, now 20-odd years later, we have that enshrined in law: Protective legislation. And it’s just wonderful and heartening to know that today, that the LGBT community in Britain and beyond can be attributed to the miners’ intervention in 1985. And that’s fantastic. And that’s why this movie is just, to us, so important because it gets a really important part of social history out there and known. One of the things that Margaret Thatcher said is that there’s no such thing as society. One of our great English writers and directors, Jonathan Miller, said the absolute opposite, he said, ‘There’s nothing but community’ and that’s what this movie’s about, it’s about community.”
On Joseph Gilgun who plays Mike Jackson in PRIDE: “It’s very flattering, darling, he’s a very handsome looking young man and he’s a Northerner like myself. He comes from a very similar background to myself in the North of England and it’s a real honor to have him play my part.”
Hollywood on the Potomac is always curious about why directors choose certain things that they do, especially if you’re talking about something that happened in the ’80s. So we asked director Matthew Warchus what drew him to this particular set of circumstances to make this movie.
“There’s two things,” he said. “I think part, it’s a wonderful story about two seeming opposite groups coming together and finding common ground. When I read it I found it so moving and powerful an idea. It’s almost like a parable in a way. I thought that message was rare and timeless and timely now. Society’s so divided. We’re all such individuals. It’s a great reminder on things that can be achieved even in an amateurish way if people just think differently. The message of it is important.
The other thing is that it made me laugh out loud constantly all the way though. The writing was so lifelike. It was written by somebody who really understands people. The characters are so well-written, vivid and honest. I kept thinking this is so honest. It could have been an agenda film and really sided with the trade union and the gays and lesbians, but it doesn’t sanctify anybody and everybody gets a healthy bit of credit. It was a rare piece of writing. What you need to understand, you probably already do, so many scripts that are written – particularly if they’re written with a mainstream audience in mind – are designed by committee almost to make sure that they do this and then this and then this…. and have a certain effect and as a result they’re hard to believe. This felt very real. I grew up in a village so I know what I’m talking about a little bit. To me, it was very refreshing and unusual in that way. I guess like I said, first of all, it seemed like what was important.”
There has been very little of that since that period of time, so we asked Warchus to explain what happened to community activism?
From the movie trailer – Photo credit: Creative Commons
“Certainly the enemies were more defined at one time than they are now. Don’t you think? Perhaps that has an affect. Maybe globalization, it’s had this double thing yet it connects us all across the globe more, but it undermines our local, our sense of locality. In a sense we’re dwarfed by globalization and we don’t feel so much that we can make a difference. We feel maybe that the wheels are turning despite us. The Internet has played a massive role in activism because like the ice bucket challenge for example. You just need a camera phone and a bucket of ice and a victim. It’s great that money is being raised but you don’t need to go anywhere or meet up with people. People they like it, they share it. They do petitions and things but it’s very individualistic activism. It doesn’t involve showing up, meeting strangers, standing with them shoulder to shoulder. We can do a lot of stuff without community activism probably now. Nevertheless there’s a loss, isn’t there? A loss is involved.”
“Tell us what you think the role of unions are today,” we asked. “Is there a strong role for them any more?”
“You mean in my experience? It’s a safeguard, it’s a safety net against exploitation. That’s fundamentally what they’re there for. I think there’s always a bit exploitation, even when there’s no current exploitation and things are well-balanced. There will be a risk when the union should get involved, but one thing I would say is that this is also exploring about breaking rules and about amateurism. Initially Mark Ashton said ‘Okay, if they’re not going to accept the money through the authorized channels, let’s go behind the backs of the union. Let’s just do it ourselves.’ There’s some rule-breaking in that. Of course eventually at the end this makes a heroic gesture and casts a block vote in support of the gays and lesbians. It comes good in the end. The key surely is politics at any level is about designing in an improvisational way. It’s the kind of society you believe in. That’s more important than manipulating opinion and winning votes. Therefore, I think there’s a great place in community politics for all kind as long as it’s not about power and manipulation.”
The March:
“What is the thing that you want the audience to take away from watching this,” we asked.
“Well, when I read it, it made me feel very, very positive about human beings. It also made me feel guilty. Am I doing enough? I think just of that, it’s just is a wake up call to the potential that we have within us, for compassion, tolerance. That’s enough because if it was a film which told you what to do next, ‘Now go away and join this group and that group and this group,’ it would be a preachy film and it would be less for it, I think, lesser. It would become a niche story and more of an agenda added to it. I think over that two hours you ultimately look at some real people and the real things that they achieved such years ago and it makes you feel better about life.
The other thing that I like to say about it is that it’s a very unusual piece of storytelling in one key way in that nearly every other story you can think of is about individuals or heroes, central characters. We worked really hard not to do that with this film. Even though different characters come into the center at different times, you never land on just one of them. To me that means we don’t have to have heroic qualities to make a big contribution to life. We can as groups, we do make the difference.”
PRIDE is a 20th Century Fox & Picturehouse Cinemas production.
The Trailer:
